Just another WordPress.com site

Tag Archives: reader

I’m a native English speaker but there are days when nothing but the verb is coherent in other people’s sentences. Even when I was in high school, I didn’t really like using super new slang when I talked. It wasn’t that I was resisting being like everyone else. My desire when I tried to communicate was that no one needed a secret code book to understand what I was trying to say.

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Now with the online games/hackers who use L33t speak, pop culture, and texting shortcuts, I’m screwed because I don’t have the same lexicon as everyone else it seems. For example, I posted on my Facebook page about how my wireless cut out but I was still listening to Pandora. Someone wrote the comments, “Buffering FTW!”

I stared at in and thought, are they dyslectic because I know WTF, mate but that is not appropriate for a response. (see if somehow I’m slightly more hip that you & you haven’t seen it yet)

Seriously, an acronym for 9 letters and 2 spaces? Are people wanted to be misunderstood? That’s why I am always on the look out for a better word to use that fits like the last puzzle piece when I talk. Maybe I’m retro in how I talk and but the meaning of word you can’t understand in my sentence, can be found in the dictionary and not some vague cultural reference that only the few plugged in people will get.

I guess my quest for a better word will leave me with a constant I-think-that-was-English face when speaking to those who don’t want to enrich their vocabulary with words that actually exist.

That there are many classic must-read books that I just have never read:
Emma,
Catcher in the Rye,
Don Quixote,
and so on.

(Image courtesy of koratmember FreeDigitalPhotos.net.)

To become a better writer one must always read. And I’m an avid reader, so why haven’t I read this classics that people always talk about? For one, everyone always talks about them so it’s not like I don’t know what’s going to happen in it and two, some of the truly older classics are so long-winded and boring that it’s hard to get through the book to harvest the great story. I really don’t want to have a whole chapter were all the author is don’t is explaining the setting. If the characters aren’t around to help break up the expository, why read it?

Yet I have read/scene most of Shakespeare’s work, loved some of the ancient philosophical texts, and an always interested in great pieces of writing no matter when it was written. Someone recently recommended a book by Georgette Heyer Frederica. The style was definitely different and the pace slower but it was a delight to read something that wasn’t the same old books that seem to follow out into the market today. Georgette Heyer though new to me started writing in 1921 and ended up writing over 50 novels and her first one has yet to go out of print.

So it’s not as though I’m against older books but the modern audience don’t want huge over loaded passages without paragraphs and over the top length descriptions of places (well, I don’t know about you but I don’t).

Is there any “classic” books that you absolutely loved but no one else has read?

As a writer, I am developing a deeper love of reading; I know, I didn’t know that was possible either but I’m so glad to be proven wrong. So now when I read things I am struck by various writers in different ways.

Here’s but a short (and not the all) list of writers who I want to emulate as I work on my own stories:

Laurie R. King, in her Mary Russell series, has blown my mind in how she unabashedly wields her large vocabulary and complex sentence structure to reinvent and flesh out an older Sherlock Holmes in a new century.

Jill Shalvis and Richard Paul Evans in their ability to build flawed characters and build conflict between two people. (Though I’m not the biggest fan of romance, I’ll read Jill Shalvis material because she nails it.)

Jennifer Cruisie, Katie MacAlister, Jim Butcher, and Kevin Hearne because they are in rare form every time I read what they write. They are amazing story tellers but most of all they make me laugh. Almost any book I pick up from them is a treat and I trust their name on the cover will be a safe bet.

If I want to grow as I writer, I must keep filling my tank up with inventive, creative, and better writers than me. It’s also a great excuse to continually read more. I’m always on the lookout for other great writers and when I find them, I’m not shy about extolling their wonderfulness to others. There’s nothing better than recommending a book to someone and when they come back they have the same glint in their eyes that I have about reading another great story.

Do you have trusted authors that you reach for time and time again? Why? I’m always got an open ear for “undiscovered” authors, well ones that I’ve never read before.

Series are best read in order, period. I know this. Yet again, I failed to listen to my own rule and I read a book that was #4, without reading 1-3. Because of that I didn’t like the book. I couldn’t buy into the story line like you can when you first meet a character and crazy stuff starts to happen around them.

It seems no matter what series I read that if I don’t start at the beginning, I have a hard time connecting to the main character. Is it because the author doesn’t take as much time with developing the character in later books? Or is that the character’s world is so twisted out of normal that everything they do without knowing the background is seems over the top?

Whatever the reason, I shall now listen to my own advice and start with #1. Then by the time the main character is swinging from chandelier with two midgets, I could possibly buy it.